Monthly archives for March, 2010

Here’s a video impression of my visit to the MVP Summit 2010 in Bellevue. Some shots from Bellevue, Seattle, the Microsoft campus and several meetings. If you’re looking for NDA content, don’t be disappointed if you can’t find any :-)

Liang Yang and Anthony F. Voellm have published an interesting article (March 2010) on the awesome performance improvements attained with the Microsoft VHD format in Windows Server 2008 R2, both in native VHD and Virtual Machine VHD.

A recent hotfix was made available by Microsoft as a workaround for a problem with Live Migration win AMD Family 10h processors.

When you run Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V on a computer that uses AMD Family 10h processors, the host computer may restart unexpectedly or stop responding. When the computer restarts or stop responding, you receive no error messages. This issue may occur when the Live Migration feature is used to move a virtual machine (VM) from one Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V-based node to another node. This problem usually affects the source node that is the original location of the VM and usually does not affect the target node that is the new location where the VM will be moved. Note This issue may occur in other scenarios and occurs not only in Live Migration scenarios.

Today Microsoft officially announced that SP1 – which will be made available as a single service pack for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – will enable dynamic memory for Hyper-V R2.

Currently each VM gets a fixed amount of memory. Ten VM’s with 2GB each, consume 20GB of RAM of the server. This limits the number of VM’s that can be running on a single physical host because unused memory is not available for adding additional VM’s.

The net effect is a higher virtual machine density per Hyper-V R2 host.

Making greater use of Dynamic Memory could have an impact on performance, but the slider which is shown below, allows the administrator to decide whether to opt for performance, for density or somewhere in between.

There was no release date communicated for SP1.

A second new feature in SP1 for R2 is Remote FX, a new set of platform capabilities in Windows Server Remote Desktop Services that enables users of virtual desktops and applications to enjoy a rich, local-like experience over the network from a broad range of client services. Remote FX is an RDP enhancement allowing remote workers to access any type of applications, improving end user productivity.